


For a Good Paws

by renecdote



Series: hc_bingo 2017 [17]
Category: Batman - All Media Types
Genre: Animal Abuse, Fluff, Gen, Puppies, Sibling Bonding, but not anything explicit
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-04
Updated: 2018-01-04
Packaged: 2019-02-28 04:51:18
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,931
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13264068
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/renecdote/pseuds/renecdote
Summary: The one where Damian and Jason do some minor illegal things to stop other illegal things from happening. Oh, and rescue some puppies.





	For a Good Paws

**Author's Note:**

> For the “abuse” square on my hurt/comfort bingo card. I went with animal abuse for the sole purpose of writing Jason with a puppy :D

It’s the twenty-third of December and someone is banging on Jason’s door. He groans and rolls over in bed, pulling his pillow over his head.

“Fuck off Dick,” he says, but it’s too quiet to be heard through the pillow muffling his words, let alone the two rooms and wooden door separating him from his visitor. He doesn’t know for sure that it’s Dick, but it’s the day before Christmas Eve so it’s a pretty good guess. His older brother has been on his case since  _ October _ to spend Christmas at the Manor. Jason has been telling him he’s not in the country.

The banging cuts off and he sighs in relief. A few more hours sleep sounds heavenly, and if he’s lucky they’ll even be nightmare free. That really would be a Christmas miracle.

His window opens.

Illusions of Christmas miracles shatter.

Light footsteps traverse the room and stop beside his bed. “Todd,” an imperious little voice demands. “Get up.”

Huh. Not Dick then.

Jason wiggles a hand out of his blanket cocoon and gives Damian the bird. Alfred would not approve of him being a “bad influence” and “corrupting” the baby bat, but Jason has not had enough sleep to care right now.

Damian huffs and tugs at the bed covers. “Todd, stop being lazy. I need your help.”

Jason clutches his blankets tightly. “Ask Dick,” he grumbles. It comes out unintelligible.

One icy little hand works its way beneath the pile of duvet and blankets and sheets to poke at his arm. Then his neck. Then his cheek. Then -  _ ow, fuck _ \- tugs on his hair.

“Get. Up.” It’s amusing, really, how unintimidating the bat-growl sounds coming from Damian’s thirteen-year-old vocal cords. “This is a matter of life or death.” 

The words are punctuated by another sharp tug on Jason’s hair. Jason sighs. He flings the pillow off his head and rolls over. “Okay, fine, I’m up. Jesus. It’s fricken early why are you even here?”

Damian looks unimpressed. “It’s almost noon.”

“ _ Early _ ,” Jason stresses. He blinks blearily at his youngest brother, dressed in his usual snobbish rich brat look (which just looks hilarious and cute on his small form), with a large winter coat over the top. A coat with a mysterious, possibly wriggling, bulge at the front. “Please tell me that’s not one of those kittens Selina was trying to find homes for.”

“Tt. Of course not.” And then, from the depths of the coat, Damian pulls out a shivering, ragged looking little creature. “It is a puppy.”

_ Because that’s so much better _ , Jason almost says. But then he gets a good look at the pup. Some kind of mutt, German Shepherd with a sprinkling of one or two other breeds maybe. There’s a noticeable chunk of fur missing from its neck, a scratch up its nose still spotted with dried blood, thin enough that it’s ribs are visible through short, scraggly fur. And that’s just what Jason can see. Guessing from the careful way Damian is cradling it, there’s a lot worse.

“Where’d you get it?” Jason asks.

“I found him,” Damian says, but it’s too quick, too defensive. 

Jason raises an eyebrow, but he lets it go. If the kid did something illegal acquiring the pup, he’s really better off not knowing about it. Plausible deniability for when Bruce inevitably finds out. Also, he doesn’t really care because whatever Damian did to get it can’t be as bad what was being done to it before that. The pup really is a sad and sorry sight.

“Why did you bring it here?”  _ Why not Dick? Why not the Manor? _

Damian’s face hardens, his arms tightening around the dog. His eyes glitter with anger and fierce protectiveness. “I need you to help me hurt some people.”

Jason holds out his fingers and the pup hesitantly leans forward to lick them. It’s little pink tongue is surprisingly dry. It’s nose, when it bumps it against Jason’s knuckles, is warm. He’s pretty sure that’s not normal.

“Okay,” Jason says. “Who’re we hurting?”

—

They strategise over omelettes, while Jason feeds tiny bits of bacon to the pup. Dog food would be better, but this isn’t exactly a situation he was prepared for so he’s working with what he’s got. 

Damian is sitting beside him, the pup is in his lap since he’d refused to let go of it except to let it drink from a small dish on the floor. He’s filling Jason in on how the dog came to be in possession. A tale that involves eavesdropping, a glossed over B&E and an illegal dog fighting circuit. Jason clenches his hand into a fist beneath the table when Damian gets to the bit about the litter of pups being kept in tiny cage in a freezing garage by the men in charge of the dog fighting.

“Why’d you take this one?” he asks curiously. He’s all for getting the pups away from the bastards and making sure they can never get within ten feet of a dog again, but it means they have to act more quickly. Before the men get home and realise the pup is missing, not just hiding under an obscure piece of furniture. Strategy-wise, rescuing one before rescuing all of them doesn’t make a lot of sense.

“He was the runt,” Damian says, eating one-handed while he plays with the dog’s silky soft ears. The fury in his tone is incongruous with how gentle he’s being. “They were going to kill him. That’s how I discovered the operation; I overheard them talking about drowning this one.”

The thought of any animals being shoved in a sack and dropped in any of Gotham’s polluted, frozen waterways makes Jason feel sick. His blood boils. He has to set down his cutlery before the urge to stab something gets taken out on his table.

Damian is watching him out of the corner of his eye. Jason closes his eyes and takes several deep, calming breaths. The pup whines softly and nudges at his arm. He opens his eyes.

“What’s the address?”

—

It’s an ordinary house. A little old and ramshackle, but well-maintained. In one of the nice-but-not-well-off neighbourhoods Gotham has to offer. At first glance, as Jason peers in windows through the scope of his gun, there’s nothing shady about it. But Damian swears they’re breeding pups for dog fights - and the one safely curled up in a box back at Jason’s apartment is proof enough that the kid is onto something.

“Front of the property is clear,” he reports, scanning the street for any sign of the bad guys’ vehicle approaching. Nothing.

“ _ Copy _ ,” Damian replies in his ear and Jason sees a figure in a dark hoodie vanish around the corner of the block. A moment later he says, “ _ Back is clear as well. Bring the van around. _ ”

Jason keenly misses his bike as he steers the clunky utility van around the corner and pulls up in the laneway behind the house. But there’s a bitch and who knows how many puppies that need to be removed from their owners and a motorcycle is hardly effective for that. Plus, the utility van is good cover.

Jason hops out and throws open the back doors. He grabs out two plastic crate containers lined with towels and ducks under the garage door Damian holds up for him. He finds Damian crouched on the floor, puppies tumbling around him while he gently strokes the head of the mother. Definitely German Shepherd, Jason sees, but the father must not be because the pups don’t look purebred. They’re all a little thin and scruffy, but unlike the runt none of them seem to be injured. 

“Start with her?” Jason asks. 

Damian shakes his head and starts lifting puppies into the crates. “She will follow -- get that one before it goes under that shelf.”

Jason retrieves the wandering pup and puts it with the others. There are nine pups all up, including the one back at his apartment. Nine pups and a bitch which Damian Jason now possess.

“What are we going to do with them?” he wonders as they load all the dogs into the back of the van. Preempting Damian’s animal adoption tendencies (which he definitely gets from his father), he adds, “I mean, we can’t keep them. And if they’re microchipped, a shelter will just return them to the owners.”

Damian climbs into the back to sit with the dogs, stretching his arms between crates to pet as many of the pups as possible. “We can’t let them come back here,” he says seriously. 

Jason nods, smirk stretching across his lips. “Don’t worry,” he says. “I have a way to make sure there’ll be no here to come back to.”

They drive off just as smoke starts pouring out of from the house. 

—

“What will you name him?” Damian asks, lying on the floor with the puppies scampering around him. 

Jason is on the couch, the first pup, the one that started this all, on his lap. The mother is at his feet, dosing while her pups tire themselves out by climbing and chewing on Damian. Not that the kid seems to mind, just gently disentangling tiny teeth every time they get too close to skin.

“I don’t know,” Jason says after some thought. It had never explicitly been said that he was keeping the pup, but a vet trip had been required earlier, and an owners name had to be given… “What about Percy?”

Damian’s nose wrinkles. “Like that annoying character from those stupid books Brown is obsessed with?”

Jason frowns at him. “What? No, like Percy Shelley, or Perseus, or the green train from Thomas the Tank Engine.”   


“Thomas the-?”

Jason cuts him off before that line of questioning can start. There’s no need to air his late night TV habits; it’s not his fault there’s hardly anything on. “Maybe not Percy,” he says. “If even your first thought is Harry Potter.”

Not that he has anything against the series. He’s just not interested enough to name his dog after a character, however unintentionally. 

Jason and Damian both stare at the pup, watching its nose twitch in its sleep. It’s not only smaller but also lighter in colour than the rest of the litter, more golden than tan with only a few dark splotches. His little face is still scrunched in that way that puppies are, and his ears don’t quite lie flat on his head. With the scratch down his nose, the missing fur and the bandage now wrapped around his leg, he’s far from perfect, but he’s still the cutest thing Jason has seen since Ace and Titus were puppies.

“Edgar,” Jason says, running his knuckles down the pup’s back. “He looks like an Edgar, don’t you think?”

Damian considers the pup for a moment longer before nodding his approval. Then he goes back to playing with the rest of the puppies. Jason leans back and closes his eyes. Edgar is a warm weight on his lap and he’s probably not going to move for a while, so Jason may as well have a nap...

“This one looks like a Henri,” Damian declares, lifting one of the pups onto his chest as he rolls over into his back. It stares down a him with floppy ears and tries to lick his nose with a killing tongue.

“No,” Jason says immeditaely. “No. Absolutely not. You don’t need to name it because you’re not keeping it. You already have a dog.”

“Titus would like a friend.”

“ _ No _ .”

**Author's Note:**

> Tumblr is [here](tantalum-cobalt.tumblr.com).


End file.
